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The Long Road In, and the Short Way Out: How the West Built Ukraine into a Weapon Against Russia

By Larry C. Johnson | Sonar21 | September 10, 2026 

Across three pieces I’ve written for Sonar21, I have been making one continuous argument: The war in Ukraine was not a crisis that erupted in 2022. It was the payoff of a deliberate, decades-long Western project to turn Ukraine into an instrument for weakening Russia — carried out under the cover of “partnership” and “peacekeeping.” And having spent thirty years building that instrument, Washington and NATO will do with Ukraine exactly what they have done with every client before it: discard it the moment it stops paying.

The camel’s nose: 1992–1999

The West slipped its nose under the Ukrainian tent almost the instant the Soviet Union collapsed. The formal machinery started in 1992, when Ukraine joined NATO’s North Atlantic Cooperation Council. The practical military ties came fast behind it: the U.S.–Ukraine State Partnership Program with the California National Guard in 1993, Ukraine’s entry into the Partnership for Peace and its first joint exercise in 1994, and the standing-up of the Yavoriv training area near Lviv.

The “peacekeeping” label was camouflage, and the drills themselves give it away. Once the Sea Breeze exercises in the Black Sea began incorporating anti-submarine warfare in the late 1990s, the humanitarian pretense was finished. You do not rehearse hunting submarines to deliver disaster relief. You do it to prepare to fight the Russian navy. I spent 23 years scripting military exercises for U.S. Special Operations Forces, and I know the difference between a training game and a rehearsal for war. These were rehearsals — a structured program to train and equip Ukraine to fight Russia, if need be with NATO at its side.

Set that against 1999, when NATO took in Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. That expansion broke James Baker’s assurance that the alliance would not move “one inch” to the east — a promise Bill Clinton simply threw away. And it is no accident that when the war came, Russia struck the Yavoriv facility in the opening weeks of March 2022. They knew exactly what had been built there, and why.

From partner to de facto member: 2000–2010

The next decade finished the job, turning Ukraine into a NATO member in everything but name. Consider one figure: between 2000 and 2010, Ukraine ranked among the top six hosts of NATO and U.S. European Command exercises, with Georgia right behind it. Two non-members hosted more allied exercises than the overwhelming majority of the actual member states. That is not partnership. That is prima facie evidence that the West meant to bring both countries in, whatever Moscow said.

By 2010, only two things still separated Ukraine from a full member: it paid no dues, and it had no Article 5 guarantee. In every operational sense — Sea Breeze, Rapid Trident, the Yavoriv pipeline, the annual target plans — it was already inside the alliance. And this was never only a military effort. U.S. and British intelligence, the CIA included, were coordinating with NATO and EUCOM to pry Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and lock it into the West’s. When the 2008 Bucharest Summit declared that Ukraine “will become a member” — even as France and Germany blocked the formal Membership Action Plan — the trajectory to 2014 and everything after was set.

The exit: under the bus

That is how the instrument was built. Here is how it gets discarded. Any foreign government that trusts an American security promise should first study what happened to the South Vietnamese, the Afghans, the Iraqis, the Libyans, the Cambodians. When a war stops serving Washington’s purposes, the U.S. says adios.

The recriminations over the failed counteroffensive are the opening of exactly that. The West is lining up to blame Kyiv while its pledges of weapons turn out to be lip service. The maritime-drone strikes on Russian ships are pinpricks — militarily trivial, and dangerous mainly because the Western surveillance that guides them invites Russian retaliation against NATO reconnaissance over the Black Sea and stiffens Moscow’s resolve to strangle Ukraine’s ports. If you want an honest barometer of where this war is heading, forget the briefings from British intelligence and the Institute for the Study of War. Watch for the day the London bookmakers start taking bets on when Zelensky falls.

The through-line

Lay the three pieces end to end and the shape is plain. The first two document the patient construction — three decades of exercises, training centers, intelligence coordination, and summit declarations, all aimed at Russia. The third describes the disposal: the moment the project stumbles on the battlefield, the same patrons who spent thirty years cultivating it start hunting for the door. The line running from the 1992 partnership councils to the blame game of 2023 is not accident, and it is not drift. It is design. The men who built the road into this war have no intention of walking back out of it alongside the country they sent down it.

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September 10, 2026 Posted by aletho | Deception, Militarism, Video | NATO, Ukraine, United States | Comments Off on The Long Road In, and the Short Way Out: How the West Built Ukraine into a Weapon Against Russia